This Hollywood, Is It Real?

Toward the end of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, my Croatian Ex-Husband and I drove up the still stabilizing Dalmatian Coast to Venice, lured by the promise of a cheap vacation. The only major flaw in our travel plans was a small section of Bosnia, where the fighting raged on, and which I will only remember as a series of tense military road blocks along the craggy coastal highway fronting the Adriatic. While the attitude toward a Dubrovnik-born national would vary according to the religious and ethnic identities of those controlling the area in question, all factions seemed very friendly toward me, an American, a Southern Californian, no less.

I remember one curious young soldier stamping out an unfiltered Camel to examine the address on my driver’s license, smiling broadly through a set of tobacco-stained teeth. “This Hollywood,” he mused aloud. “Is it real?” He'd  apparently mistaken Hollywood for a concept rather than an actual city where ordinary people go about their daily business. Given our famous way with illusion, this is an easy trap to fall into, even among those of us who call the place home.



This morning My Very Supportive Manager set up a meeting with Yet Another Confident Young Producer interested in my Hilarious Funeral Comedy. By “interested in” I mean she wants the right to pass it around among her Big Deal Movie Star Friends without having to put up the money for an option, while at the same time being guaranteed the credit rightfully due her should a feature film ever result from her tenuous involvement. For her part, Supportive is a master at making these people think this lopsided deal would be ever so interesting to us, while she’s primarily trolling these waters in search of work for me among the producer’s open studio writing assignments.

Either way, I get a free meal, and this one would prove to be some seriously glamorous eats. Though it’s only blocks from my house, I’d never been inside the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel—a mammoth, Spanish Revival grande dame—into which I, the jaded former travel writer walked in and gasped, “Is it real?”

In a case of art imitating life, the recently renovated hotel—the sight of the very first Academy Awards Ceremony in 1929—seems to have inspired the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror at the Disney MGM Studios, a thrill ride trailing a Shirley Temple-esque child star who falls to her death in a runaway elevator. Those crafty Imagineers were clearly aware that the real Shirley Temple received her first tap dance lesson from Bill “Bojangles” Robinson on the Moorish tiled stairway in the lobby. 

The place is said to be haunted by Montgomery Clift, who stayed here during the filming of From Here To Eternity while learning to play the bugle—a skill he still practices, or so the hotel guests claim, on long, windy nights. Marilyn Monroe’s ghost often appears in the mirror re-claimed from her poolside bungalow—which is no big surprise, since it’s now strategically placed to reflect a portrait of the starlet hanging in a public hallway.

Having undergone a major renovation, the hotel made more recent headlines when Courtney Love passed out while partying here and had to be whisked right back to rehab in an ambulance. The clubs and restaurants are being vigorously marketed to the Hollywood A-list by promoter Amanda Scheer-Demme, widow of the much loved late director Ted Demme, who was apparently a close personal friend of the Confident Young Producer hosting me for breakfast today at “Teddy’s.”

“Actually, I knew the gentleman this place was named for,” she told the Snooty Maitre D’. This was at least partially in response to his inquiry as to whether we had reservations—or were at least guests of the hotel.

“You knew Theodore Roosevelt?” he sniffed.

“Oh. I thought it was named for Ted Demme,” she said.

“It’s been the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel,” he replied, “since Mr. Roosevelt was President.”

“Right,” she said, deferring to this geek sporting an attitude dyed to match his employer-provided tuxedo. I mean, here she was about to drop a hundred bucks on a couple of plates of hash only to be trumped by the help.

“Wait a minute now,” I piped in. “Maybe Ted Demme was named for Ted Roosevelt. In fact, I’m sure I read that somewhere.”

This pretty simpleton had never read anything anywhere, and thus didn’t have much to add. He slinked away, a failed soap star with a spray-on tan relegated to inquiring if lowly tourists are “on the list” while buffing the oversized leather menus with Armor All.


“Thank you for that,” Confident mouthed. “Thank you for this,” I said, as a far more appropriate waiter—the type whose father used to serve Erroll Flynn at this very table, who considers all this his legacy—unfolded a crisp white napkin on my lap. “I think I’ll try the Eggs Benedict, so what if it is a Tuesday.”

I'm sure I heard that ghostly bugle whistling the theme from Bridge Over The River Kwai as coffee and water were poured from linen-tied silver pitchers. Another thing they won’t tell you in film school is that while you’re waiting around for that big phone call certain to change your life forever, success really can sneak up on you one meal at a time. And maybe not every day, but certainly on some of them, yes, this Hollywood is real.

Fly Me to the Moon

This week I went in to pitch an open studio assignment to re-write an R-rated comedy. This was somewhat tricky, since the producing partner of an A-list, twice Oscar-nominated actor wrote the original draft off which I'd only managed to preserve the character names. He would have the final word on my hiring, so my Very Supportive Manager told me just march in and "be adorable about it."

Yesterday the studio executive phoned Supportive to say I had indeed "delivered a movie." The producer reported that I was in fact adorable but he’d like to have lunch with me privately just to be sure I hold up well under harsh lighting conditions. Oh, and he’s got to hear one more “courtesy take” next week—either from his lover, his nephew or the brother-sister team of Sofia and Roman Coppola would be my guess—before making the final decision.

This time it’s not a one in three chance, or even two in three. It’s ninety percent, Supportive estimates. We’re relying on the executive who is trying to set up my spec script and senses I can’t wait as long as that might take. While Supportive feels I should avoid begging, fawning or crying in the meeting room, just for laughs I may have intimated how I only have three weeks left on my unemployment claim and plan to either sell my car to pay next month’s rent or give up my house and move into my car.  Supportive isn’t sure of the exact pay on the ten-week re-write, but the ballpark figure is more than I’ve managed to scratch together over the last four years combined.

Surviving this kind of wait requires many hours of re-arranging my sock drawer, polishing what I haven’t pawned off of the family silver and scrubbing the bathroom grout with an old toothbrush.  I sorted through an old music box filled with jewelry I never wear and thought about throwing out the box along with the J.Lo hoop earrings the size of shower curtain rings that seemed fabulous at the time. Then I remembered my grandmother had given me the box one Christmas. I doubt it was very expensive, just something she picked up on sale at J.C. Penney’s while passing the last of her Golden Years mall walking for exercise.

I never knew her very well until I was in my twenties and she bought a condo near my first apartment. She’d raised my mother alone and never felt obligated to say exactly why. It seemed to me she hadn’t answered to much of anyone in her life at a time when a girl could get arrested for that. She worked two jobs to put my mother through Catholic school, private college and even grad school. Beginning the day my mom gave up her teaching career to marry a struggling law student, Grandma referred to my father as “Whatshisname.” Though she didn’t drink often, she didn’t do it well. Even a glass or two of dessert wine on Christmas Eve fostered some paranoid delusion that Frank Sinatra was trying to kill her. I never did get the details, but frankly it seemed perfectly plausible. She died when I was twenty-six, of natural causes. Later appearing to me in a dream, young again and dressed in fox furs in front of some swank, pre-War hotel, she'd never looked happier.

I couldn’t remember the song the music box played, so I wound it up, expecting the usual "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies" or "Moonlight Sonata." It was "Fly Me To The Moon," made famous by Frank Sinatra.

Fly me to the moon

and let me play among the stars.

Let me see what spring is like

on Jupiter and Mars…

With that, she'd managed to deliver another message from beyond that there was never a thing to fear, that the future most certainly holds something truly magical for me if I can only hang on long enough to let it. I gave myself exactly five minutes to cry before getting up to clean the bathroom.

Note: In response to a student's request for specifics of my Hollywood journey, I've re-published this piece from January 7, 2006. And yes, I did get the job. Stay tuned for tomorrow's post, "Be Careful What You Wish For, My Little Hollywood Hopeful."

Miss Julie Makes a Movie

My first name has inspired quite a few screen gems over the years. Much of the early credit for my nominal popularity belongs to August Strindberg, who wrote a 1888 stage play about love, lust, power, class warfare and death before dishonor. Though the movies were decades away -- courtesy of those judgy French of all people -- this Miss Julie is here to tell you that's the plot of pretty much all of them.

If you don't believe me, look no farther than the poster outside every brand of world theater. This time of year it's a sure bet I'm being mounted, forgiving the innuendo, on a summer stage near you. While the community player crowd can't get enough of me, how is it nobody's after new material with my name on it? Et tu, Main Street?

A longtime favorite at the cineplex, I was once played by Doris Day, according to what has to be the coolest piece of key art ever. Boy, they really laid it out for you back in the '50s, when enticing the masses into the cheap seats meant painting an extra disturbing portrait of the female psyche. "What happened to Julie on her honeymoon?" You'll have to pony up a quarter for the answer to that freaky diagnosis. Something tells me Hitchcock passed on me, the fat bastard. So what if I'm not an icy blonde with a kitchen knife? "Run, Julie, run run run for your life!"

In the seventies, Julie went to Bollywood, where I naturally became a huge blockbuster among all four quadrants of the lucrative Younger Older Sikh Sunni audience. I am a girl next door from Goa who gets dumped by my boyfriend and moves to Mumba to become a call girl. Mayhem ensues when my boyishly handsome millionaire industrialist boyfriend (think President of the Senior Caste) uncovers my checkered past. Still a very hot ticket, I likely incite many a  hallway skirmish in the rougher Punjabi film schools.











Judging from the poster pimping his good name beneath my own, Peter Sellers plays either my dad or my boyfriend in John and Julie. I'm a cheeky English schoolgirl who runs off to London to see the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Eerily similar to my real life story, my journey to that big party to which I was never invited is seriously impeded by the many questionable characters I encounter along the way. I ask you, how can one name in all its various derivations enjoy so much significance in film and so little in filmmaking?

Call it Romeo & Juliet, Gnomeo & Juliet or Homeo & Juliet, the all-new queer film certain to open a future fringe festival.
Call it Fröken Julie from Ingmar Bergman's bunch or Mademoiselle Julie of the French New Wave.
Call it blog-based The Julie Julia Project,the rare one hundred percent inconsequential Meryl Streep spot-on cultural icon vehicle. And yes, I do have an ax to grind, since I formally answer to both Julie and Julia -- and also have an eponymous blog overdue for a big screen debut. Or a small one. Seriously, would it kill someone to fund, cast and shoot me for free streaming in some obscure web series nobody's talking about?

Though that pretty much wraps it up for my on-screen credits, I also enjoy remarkable irrelevance in pop music. Look no farther than Bobby Sherman, who never once bothered to meet, date or marry me. Though I highly doubt he actually wrote "Julie Do You Love Me," that guy built an entire career on my name -- which sure makes one of us.

All Quiet at the Best Western Burbank

I started writing my first screenplay while literally under fire. At least that's the way it felt visiting Dubrovnik at the tail end of the civil war. Working as travel writer at the time, I was there with some well-meaning congressional sub-committee or another bent on helping the city re-build its tourism infrastructure just a tad prematurely. For one thing, once the Serbs bombed the power plant for what seemed to be sport, no electricity was to be had, not even at the finest hotel.

We toured shelled out castles and imploded museums, visiting shrapnel-riddled churches guarded by decapitated Jesuses. Daniel Day-Lewis, in his bravest performance ever, dodged sniper-fire— along with snickers from battle-scarred locals judging him pretty goofy, under the circumstances—to stage Hamlet on the ramparts. Seized by the tragicomedy of it all, I sat alone in a waterfront bar, turning the sweat-dampened pages of my reporter's notebook to scribble the bones of a classic wartime satire.

Yeah, not so fast.

All these many years later, just when I've finally regained the luxury of writing at home, my television set broke. I was thinking of cutting it off anyway to save on the cable bill, since I never watch anything but Jeopardy, Chopped and the live trial of some oversexed murderess who'll probably end up V-logging in hiding after the bombshell verdict. Disparate as my programming choices may seem, is each not the stuff of high drama?

Will the geek grab the cash? What about the chef who lost his finger in a head of escarole to save the family diner? Will the twat Tweet from the gallows?

Though I'm not at all sure how to go about my day without the most basic of creature comforts, the fact is comfort is anathema to the serious writer— even an out-of-work Hollywood writer with the hard-won humility to use that term very loosely. The point is, if drama is born of conflict, why are we writers always fighting it tooth and nail?

“It is easy to write," goes the quote most often credited to Ernest Hemingway. "Just sit in front of your typewriter and bleed.” The fact that these words have been claimed by no less than fourteen subsequent writers should tell you something extra about the brutality of our ragtag little militia.

As with any battle the career soldier will somehow learn to survive, a bout of writing gets easier once the adrenaline kicks in.

There does come that magic moment, once I'm deep enough into a story, when the characters will capture my fingers and deliver the story on my behalf. I wouldn't say peace washes over the land, but there is detente. For now, anyway, I am where I'm supposed to be, doing what I'm supposed to be doing.

As for learning to live inside the green zone of my mind without surrendering to an onslaught of daily distractions, maybe I don't need a battalion of extraneous characters buzzing around the home front once I get  my own brigade of imaginary friends primed to come out and spar. All it takes to charge on alone into the unknown -- all it's ever taken, now that I think of it— is feeling okay about turning my back on my real friends, past and future, along with the new husband I never married, the home we never bought and the family we never had.

Like I say, folks, war ain't pretty. War is war, war is hell and war happens for a reason, not the least of which is it makes the best movies.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to write one of those here in the idyllic suburbs of Southern California. Right after I call the junkman to haul off the corpse of the dead TV—and take a quick look online to see if we've got a verdict on the whack job with the boob job tearing up the airwaves.

I Dream of Julie

Here in Hollywood, we have many theories about how to get material into the right hands. An old film school friend once told me if you're convinced you have a great screenplay, toss it out the window on the freeway to make sure. His name was Greg, and he had been a successful musician, touring the world with any number of jazz legends before setting his sights on screenwriting. Like me, he had been living a dream life, just not his dream. Having stumbled into our earlier creative successes, we felt reasonably confident about sitting back and letting Hollywood happen.

Sadly, while there are plenty of stories about starlets discovered only by happenstance, it turns out not a single movie has been made after its script was found sitting on a stool in Schwab's Drugstore. We do love our underdog stories, and those of us charged with dreaming them up have an unnerving talent for putting a plausible spin on the unlikeliest scenarios.

For example, I am always in awe of writers I came up with who are still out there entering screenwriting competitions. Designed to discover newcomers, for the most part, the more prestigious of these generally don't allow anyone who's formally reached professional status to enter. Yet here these folks are, year after year, refusing to give up. I guess there's the prize money to be considered, along with an expected flurry of interest from agents and producers. Probably most important, though, is the tangible proof we all crave that we are not stark raving mad.

The other day I came across some studio coverage of an early script of mine. "Pitch perfect," the story analyst pronounced it. "A little gem."

Having indeed won a big competition back in the day, the script earned me an offer of representation by my longtime former manager, who'd served as an industry judge. It landed me a bunch of meetings around town and secured my first feature assignment.  What it didn't get was produced.

"Whenever a script has this many laugh out loud moments, it's got my vote for development consideration," the analyst concluded. I never met this random fan, before or since, though I did Google her name to learn she's now a professor of creative writing. You can read the rest of her coverage here. It's old and it has a big coffee stain on it, but I uploaded it just as it is.

Hollywood is anything but a meritocracy, so good writing has little if anything to do with making a good living nor heaven forbid making a good movie.  Once you've been told you've got talent by someone other than your mother, it's very hard indeed to walk away.







I haven't spoken to Greg lately, but I heard he's back in the music business on the East Coast, and that he recently self-published his first novel on Amazon.

Who Do You Know, What Have You Got?

"You can't find any true closeness in Hollywood," Carrie Fisher once said, "because everybody does the fake closeness so well." While I don't have her pedigree or connections, I recently got to test the veracity of my longstanding personal friendship with the president of a cable television network. In Hollywood terms, this means we've never met but he's been following my blog for awhile.

A light but loyal surface skimming is about as intimate as it gets between two people in this town. The stakes are only heightened when one of you is a power player and the other is a struggling screenwriter dishing up the snark safely under the cover of semi-anonymity. So ardent is this highly-placed executive's fandom, however, he signs his actual name to our volleyed chuckles in my comments section.

This open display of e-ffection here on my digi-pedestal might have emboldened me to contact him to enlist his support of a big TV gig I'm after. In any other business, in any other town, ours might be considered a casual e-ffair, but here in Hollywood we are as real as it gets. Unless we'd been bonded by blood, of course, or went to the same day camp, where we later become counselors and made out.

Whether she likes her mother or not, Carrie Fisher would tell you this is a family town, where careers are built on going to the right barbecue in the right bikini emblazoned with the name of the right university across the right butt. I certainly don't have anything that cheeky for him to latch onto in the big bunny hop around the pool.

No, ours is a virtual connection, far too flimsy to survive a jump to the flesh and bones of a cell phone call placed to his convertible on PCH. He'd have to be patched through by a snoopy assistant, some niece's niece barely out of her teens who's after the same job. There would be poor reception and a lot of those awkward, overlapping bursts before the line went dead and we all three knew the jig was up, however bravely played.

 I decided to drop him a short LinkedIn message it took me a day and a half to craft. "Hey you, it's me, please help," I finally wrote, attaching the job posting. His reply came about a week later. "Oh hi. Yeah sure. Will do."

 She shoots, she scores!

Though hardly cinematic on either front, in my mind he may as well have gotten down on one knee and proposed marriage on live national television. He'd have to initiate a speedy divorce from his beautiful wife and relinquish sole custody of any and all sticky little children, but still. Winning.

As for how such a casual exchange could be perceived with such glee on my part, I guess it's true that we just don't do genuine very well here in Hollywood. We reserve heartfelt dialogue and big, feel good endings for the screen, where we have ninety meaningful minutes to effect the unlikely triumph of a little guy like me. Unless you were born into this game -- or know somebody who knows somebody who was --  that often means writing about life while you sit and wait another day for yours to happen.

Panties Are Not a Punchline, Honey, Just Shut Up and Bring the Funny

I've been thinking about what it is to be a funny, female writer who  gives it all away in these pages as though hostessing some budget-friendly girlie show in the sky. The way I figure it, a humor blogger  should really shoot for adorable, self-styled glamour-puss over bitter little misanthrope when welcoming a crowd gathering for a laugh. Not that any of that happens much here. Stop me when I'm overreaching.

"The definition of 'crazy' in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to sleep with her anymore," Tina Fey tells us.

In that case I'm in a pretty good position, as positions go, since I mostly write quietly and for my own amusement. Then again, there's only so much navel-gazing you can do and hope to become as relevant as say, Leah Dunham's anus. However ass-backwards, maybe the rest of her only got into the game because self-deprecating humor was her birthright as a direct descendent of Manhattan's post-feminist gliteratti. There's a crowd that kept right on gabbing long after the sexy came and went.

Back in the day, a midwest housewife named Phyllis Diller was actually too hot for this job, and only came up with the whole crazy chicken look to take your mind off wanting to nail her. Joan Rivers felt Johnny Carson both brought her up and took her down as though she'd belonged to him on both ends, like a disposable early wife. To check the strength of current ties between comic appeal and sex appeal, count up all the comediennes -- from Kathy Griffin to Molly Shannon, Sarah Silverman and even Sandra Bernhard -- whose underwear you can describe in some detail. Now try this with the guys -- until you get to a single goofball who looks any good in it.

In life as in comedy, most girls will do what it takes to draw an audience, and the truth is we don't care how you got here as long as you pay for your own drinks and stay awake for the show.

At my level, even bothering to read my work earns you the right to rip into it at leisure. My mother told me that my brother didn't care for an online novella I wrote about a sexually adventurous former panty model who goes to work for L.A.P.D. Hollywood Division. To me this is the perfect comic set up, but he found it inappropriate for children, of which he has three, apparently comprising the remainder of my readership. The whole brood gathers around the family laptop in the evening to read Auntie's uncensored internet musings. And I'm inappropriate? Seriously, get an X-Box and some boundaries.

Mom herself dismissed my brief foray into smut writing with a snort. "You're better than that," she announced. Really? Who knew? I figure in the absence of any monetary recognition (or really any other kind) in this digital cabaret of mine, I am entitled to some authenticity of voice. As I tell the students in my on-again off-again film professor gig, there's all kinds of talent in this town, but nobody brings you but you.

Though there are many schools of thought as to whether comedy can be learned, I see my whole life as a sketch in search of its rightful pay-off. "I think if you have a comic perspective, almost anything that happens you tend to put through a comic filter, " Woody Allen told The Paris Review in an interview on the art of comedy. "People think it’s very hard to be funny but it’s an interesting thing. If you can do it, it’s not hard at all."

While you'd expect a few choice pearls of "hisdom" from the guy behind the loopy, self-doubting humor of Annie Hall, his comic perspective is remarkably free of gender bias:

It would be like if I said to somebody who can draw very well, My God, I could take a pencil and paper all day long and never be able to draw that horse. I can’t do it, and you’ve done it so perfectly. And the other person feels, This is nothing. I’ve been doing this since I was four years old. That’s how you feel about comedy—if you can do it, you know, it’s really nothing.

"Is he still shtupping his daughter?" Mom inquired, as if that were right on point with today's topic. I saw him in a Q&A a few years back and told her this hadn't come up. But the two them have been married awhile now, so I doubt it. See, now that's funny.

Halloween in Hollyweird

With the possible exception of special effects artists, who tend to be year-round freaks, folks working in the entertainment industry don't much care for Halloween. We see our share of illusion, day in and day out, and unless somebody's paying minimum union scale plus pension and healthcare, we're rarely in the mood to dress up and play along.

Coincidentally, this is also my theory as to why your big Hollywood starlet runs off to an ashram for her first couple of weddings, barefoot and clothed only in her own hair; she has worn the big white dress at work and it just wasn't all that interesting. Then again, neither was the semi-nude thing on the banks of the Ganges at sunrise under the spell of some faux yogi and a wicked hangover. It takes an average of fourteen months to sort all that out, claim she was off her meds and seek a quick Mexican annulment and secret tummy tuck.

Anyway, that's how it went for me, give or take a few fungible details. The point being that, although the search for high drama is what brought us here, we are unlikely to make our own just for sport. Having made our big escape into the bowels of fantasyland only to discover there's no way out, we know all too well that fun can be anything but good and clean. Somewhere along the way, we gurus of glamour become the proverbial shoemakers with no shoes, kitten-heeled or otherwise.

Though I have been a working writer for the better part of thirty years, my showbiz career actually began in front of the camera. While I sometimes refer to myself as a former child actress, that's really mostly to throw you off as to my true age.

The fact is, I worked well into my twenties, starting on the stage and working my way up to television commercials and even an iconic network role or two. I auditioned for (but didn't get) the role of Nick Nolte's secretary in Cape Fear and Burt Reynolds's secretary in Striptease. Apparently I exuded a screen presence that made me ill-suited for office work. Apparently.

Digging through some old photos this past week, I couldn't find a single picture of myself in costume just for fun. I was either starring in the school play, thus turning in some of my greatest work to date—or else being snapped  by a script supervisor for continuity on location somewhere far more exotic than anywhere I've been lately.

As for my current Halloween plans, I live in a barn set behind a large main house, where I wouldn't get much attention from the trick-or-treaters unless I set the place on fire. I'm off sugar, as well as alcohol, carbs, high heels, low necklines and brief, barefoot marriages, doomed before they began. I may decorate a pumpkin or two but I don't like to carve into them at all so they last all the way through to Christmas. Life imitating art and all, that's a ho-ho-holiday we ho-ho-Hollywood hoes can get behind.

Big Hollywood Call In the Sky

My cousin's kid, a college freshman back east, wrote me that he hoped to make it to Hollywood some day and maybe even have a future in showbiz. I told him what I tell my own students who share that unfortunate yearning. "You can do or be anything you want to be," I offered up in all its American Girl doll-of-the-year theme song simplicity.

I left off the second half of the sentence—"That is, as long as you are willing to pay the price"—as I often do in cases of extreme fresh-faced youthful optimism. Part of me thinks this little hitch is so obvious it's not worthy of a reminder. The other part doesn't want to be the first to offer up the gory details.

All these many years into my own Hollywood journey, the price to which I refer has not so much been the sting of rejection, as one would expect, but rather the endless, relentless, unyielding anguish of waiting.You learn to live life riding the hold button like an electronic bull, not sure why you're hanging on when being thrown off would be just as sweet a relief. Something, anything to break the monotony of anticipation—even a no would do once it becomes so painfully clear just how rare and delicious a yes will be.

Worse yet, in a town where anything can happen at any moment and hardly ever does, the self-imposed sentence to life in limbo as time marches on—toward your inevitable irrelevance either way—applies to all levels of success. I once heard, for example, that the Oscars after party for Saving Private Ryan felt downright funereal after Steven Spielberg spent the entire awards season waiting for his name to be called, only to lose in a last minute upset to Shakespeare in Love.

I can only imagine his camp's more recent state of embitterment after Lincoln fell victim to the same waiting game all year, only to lose to that scrappy little Argo bunch. Still, you can't help but envy the Dreamworks crew for knowing, at long last, whether the next morning would hold firings or promotions and a fleet of new Priuses peppering the lot, courtesy of the boss.

For my money, some news, any news—good, bad or, yes, even indifferent—is always going to offer up some peace, however bittersweet. Another thing about Hollywood, though, is nobody wants to be the one to tell you no. They don't even want to tell you yes for fear of taking the heat should you and your little project fail, against all odds, to hand Spielberg his ass in the underdog story of the century. 

I did not share any of this with my cousin, most especially not that last thing. You don't come to Hollywood to get good at waiting. You come here to happen, and then it turns out there's no such thing. For my part, there is always blogging. I figure you can't get any more proactive then hitting "publish" at will between steady gigs such as mine, most recently, writing theme songs for American Girl.  "You can do and be whatever you want to be." Oh, come on. Did you really think I just pull that kind of gold out of the sky?